14 May 2026 – Baldur Bjarnason When I was living in the UK, one of the more common responses people had to me being Icelandic – beyond the strangely common “I hate Björk” refrain – was some comment about Vikings or Norse mythology. I’m guessing my name helped prompt those. We all have very traditional Icelandic names in my family. If the comment caught me at the wrong time, I’d occasionally reply in my usual literal-minded way: The Vikings were coastal raiders and Iceland is an island in the middle of bloody nowhere. Once Iceland was settled in 930, we were mostly a nation of farmers and substantially Celtic. We were probably the least ‘Viking’ of all the Nordic countries. Besides, we converted to Christianity in the year 1000, so we were only pagan for a few decades at most. The Icelandic Sagas are a bit like cowboy movies in that they’re the events of a few short years spun into a nation-building mythology that’s well out of proportion to their historical impact.…